An Internet Appliance is a device such as a telephone, refrigerator or stove that, while dedicated to its inherent function, is also connected to the Internet via a network. Typically, an Internet Appliance supports applications that require data from the Internet Appliance to be passed on to another service on the Internet. For example, a particular service might require an Internet Appliance telephone to provide its directory number so it could be used to forward calls. As another example, a different service might require an Internet Appliance CD player identification code so that a particular driver for the CD player could be updated. Since Internet Appliances may behave also as portals to the Internet for 3rd party applications, it is useful to have the Internet Appliances provide local information for the 3rd party applications to the service provider.
An example of a service that benefits from receiving such local information is a Location-based service.
Location-based services are those that leverage information about a user's environment in order to enhance a service. Such information may describe a physical location, but more generally will be identification information describing the network portal. Some further location-based services are described below:
A presence service leverages location information to project to other users of the system how to contact a person. Such contact information is a description of a service and address that can be used by a presence client to initiate a communication session between 2 or more users. When a person changes locations, and they wish to signal their new location using presence, they will send a request to a presence server using a portal.
In a manner similar to the presence service, a personal assistance service requires portal information to facilitate, for instance, “Call Forwarding” capabilities.
A monitoring service can also take advantage of location information provided by, for instance, a telephone Internet Appliance as a portal. By mapping a telephone directory number to a physical room number it is possible to track users in a hospital or office building, for instance.
There are three ways in which 3rd party applications now take advantage of local Internet Appliance portal information.
The first approach is to have the Internet Appliance contain an application designed to respond to custom requests from a 3rd party. For example, an Internet Appliance telephone might understand a Forward Call request from a 3rd party application and will respond to it by requesting from the user an identification code in order that it may process the request. However, this particular approach has been found to be somewhat inflexible because it requires that the Internet Appliance manufacturer work closely with the application developers to implement all of the custom requests that are desired.
The second approach is to have the 3rd party application first request information from the Internet Appliance and then compose a further request to the service provider using the data received from the first request. This approach is somewhat of an improvement on the first approach because it provides an application developer reasonable flexibility and the Internet Appliance manufacturer need only let the application developer know what information the Internet Appliance will provide. However, because of the two-step communication process, this approach is not particularly efficient. In addition, this approach requires that two separate communication channels be established between the third party application and the Internet Appliance: one to query the Internet Appliance and the other to communicate with the service provider.
The third approach is to have the application request the Internet Appliance to act on its behalf to perform a request to the service provider. An example of this approach is the use of the SIP REFER method. A “referror” (the third-party application) causes the “referee” (the Internet Appliance portal) to perform the SIP request to the service provider on its behalf. In performing the request, the “referee” confers its own information to the service provider. However, this approach imposes a limit on the type of information that the portal can pass on to the service provider, leaving the 3rd party application unable to control the type or nature of the information sent to the service provider. Further information on the SIP protocol can be found in SIP: Session Inititation Protocol, IETF SIP Working Group Draft, October 2001, Rosenberg, Schulzrinne, Camarillo, Johnston, Peterson, Sparks, Handley and Schooler.
It is an objective of an aspect of the present invention to provide an improvement to the way local information can be extracted from Internet Appliance portals for use by location-based services.